ARTICLES ABOUT WORLD BY DATE - PAGE 3

Michael Angelakis, Comcast Corp.'s financial guru and vice chairman, was named one of the nation's top chief financial officers by the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday. The Journal rated him third, based on Comcast's return on invested capital, operating margin, dividend growth, and share buybacks over the last three years. The top two CFOs were Karen Hoguet of Macy's Inc. and Robert Knight of Union Pacific Corp. The Journal evaluated the financial performance of the companies in the S&P 500 index.

SIX FAMILY members slaughtered by a Montgomery County man who then took his own life. One hundred forty-three, mostly children, killed in a Pakistan school by the Taliban. One hundred sixty-five children kidnapped in Nigeria by Boko Haram. Two New York police shot in cold blood. And that's just last week. The world is never exactly a sane place, but lately it seems that the madness has increased. Few corners of the world are free from strife, from unbearable tensions.

Services will be held Tuesday, Dec. 23, for Phyllis Jean Lewis Prible, 82, a longtime resident of Malvern and a world traveler who died at home Friday, Nov. 14, of complications from liver disease. Born in Huntington, Ind., to Roscoe R. and Mildred Lewis, Mrs. Prible moved to Malvern in 1967 and remained there for 47 years. Her life was centered on her family. She and husband, Glen V. Prible, were four days short of celebrating their 64th anniversary. They had never spent an anniversary apart, said her daughter Susan P. Warmuth.

Students at William Tennent High School didn't know what it takes to run a supermarket - until one opened on campus. Inside the Warminster school, a one-room ShopRite offers the snacks, drinks, and laundry detergent students and staff can buy at a bigger version of the supermarket a mile away. But this ShopRite - designed in the chain's signature red, yellow, and black - is about more than the customer. The mini-branch at Tennent, which opened in October, is part of an internship and career program aimed at giving students a taste of work in the real world.

Ray White, a 90-year-old World War II veteran, was left homeless after befriending a con man who systematically scammed him out of his South Philadelphia house, vintage Bentley and Cadillac, and everything else he valued. On Tuesday, 61-year-old Melvin McIlwaine pleaded guilty to cheating White of his worldly possessions, clearing the way for the retiree who served in the Battle of the Bulge to put his life back together. The guilty plea came at "the eleventh hour," just as jury selection was about to begin for McIlwaine's criminal fraud trial, said Assistant District Attorney Deborah Cooper Nixon.

World Café Live isn't an inherently quiet space. Even when conversations at the bar are at a minimum, the clinking of glasses and silverware and the ordering of drinks tend to create a background din for lower-volume performances. But the packed crowd seemed to hold its collective breath from the moment the Brad Mehldau Trio took the stage Friday night, maintaining a near-complete silence for the entire 100-minute performance. The pianist and his triomates - bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Jeff Ballard - have inspired just that sort of hushed reverence for the decade they've been together (twice that, if you include the equally lauded tenure of former drummer Jorge Rossy)

It seems impossible that a film as small and intimate as the two-character drama Diplomacy could say so much about the Nazi ethos during World War II. Yet German master filmmaker Volker Schlöndorff ( The Tin Drum , Swann in Love ) achieves just that in his latest film, a fact-based account of the final hours before the Allies liberated Paris from German occupation on Aug. 25, 1944. Adapted from French playwright Cyril Gély's 2011 play, Diplomacy isn't a conventional war movie.

Tom "Chico" Stafford is an imposing figure - both physically, at 5-foot-10, 240 pounds, and by what comes out of his mouth. He apologizes for cursing but says he gets frustrated with his African American community. What especially riles the 64-year-old serial entrepreneur are those who ask for handouts and those who allow money to define them. The latter has happened to hip-hop culture, Stafford said, with rappers whose lyrics degrade women and celebrate drugs and gross consumerism getting all the attention - and a good deal of sales.

WASHINGTON - He walked into a room named for Theodore and Franklin D. Roosevelt, just behind President Obama and Vice President Biden, as members of the president's inner circle and national defense elites stood and applauded. Ashton Carter, born in Philadelphia and raised in Abington, had a bright moment in the spotlight Friday morning as he was nominated to become secretary of defense, which would put him in charge of the world's most powerful military and a host of vexing challenges.

The phone call from New York came in mid-October. Could the Moorestown Theater Company stage a world-premiere workshop production of a new children's musical - before Christmas? "We knew there were a lot of hurdles to clear, but we do that every day with every show," says director Mark Morgan, noting that MTC has 94 shows to its credit. Music Theatre International, which licenses productions of adult and junior versions of Broadway musicals, asked MTC to stage The Magic Tree House: A Ghost Tale for Mr. Dickens, Jr. "as a favor," Morgan says.